Poetry By Catherine O'Brien
Everyday Aviation
There’s so much talk of birds but what about the worm’s-eye view? No, it’s not obscure. This is not the calligraphy of a camel. This is the wickerwork of your understanding deconstructing its maze. The fruit bowl of dolls in your basement. It’s so weird like a greeting card featuring a casserole and yet you’re just leaving it there. You enjoy heckling and pinging but what sculpted finesse of phrase will it take to get that kiln your neurons call home firing? If you could take tracing paper to the yearbook which year would you choose? I’m guessing it’s that year your face wore a bonnet in the sun when your babbling added colour to the harmony of the everyday, when vegetables glued themselves to the gravel of your tongue. Now you’ve got poetry and it’s got backstitch, stone-cut sarcasm, linoleum trimmed with a pastry cutter, the natural confidence of the underdressed, that undeniable frieze of human want and waste masquerading as trinkets of personal expression.
Catherine O’Brien is an Irish writer of poems, flash fiction and short stories. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in English Literature. Her work has most recently appeared in Splonk, X-R-A-Y, Frazzled Lit Magazine, Full House Literary, Trash Cat Lit and Bending Genres. She featured on the Wigleaf Top 50 longlist 2024 and has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions (2023). You can find out more on X @abairrud2021.